


Wisps of Smoke

by Drag0nst0rm



Series: Smoke [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fae Sirius, Background Character Death, But he still loves Harry a lot, Dark Sirius Black, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28441032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/pseuds/Drag0nst0rm
Summary: Sirius raises Harry.Harry has a happy childhood but a strange one.That doesn't really change when he gets to Hogwarts.
Relationships: Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley, Sirius Black & Harry Potter, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin
Series: Smoke [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2083260
Comments: 23
Kudos: 207





	Wisps of Smoke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MegMarch1880](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MegMarch1880/gifts).



**Remus**

Remus does not know what Sirius is, not exactly, but his wolf knows - something.

(The wolf knows when another predator is bigger than it is.)

And Remus is not his wolf - _he’s not, he’s not, no matter what the laws of the ministry say, he is more than blood and pain and the bite_ \- so he doesn’t quite know what the wolf knows, but he knows _something._

It doesn’t matter much when they’re all boys running wild in the forest, convinced of their own immortality. It matters a little more in the war, when all the other students whose scents make the wolf’s hair stand up on end are on the other side, but then, all the werewolves are on the other side, and Sirius never once looks amiss at Remus. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t.

It doesn’t matter until Albus tells him James and Lily are dead and Harry is missing. It doesn’t matter until Albus tells him they were betrayed.

It doesn’t matter until the newspaper tells him that Peter was ripped into bloody shreds.

He stares down at the picture of the crime scene with shaking hands until a pale hand rips the paper away from him.

“I should have made it last longer,” Sirius says.

He is holding Harry in his other arm. It is the only thing that keeps Remus from lunging for his throat.

Sirius’s eyes are still crackling with dark fire when he looks up from the paper. He has the gall to look surprised by Remus’s expression.

“Traitors deserve what they get,” Sirius insists. “I don’t care what the Ministry says, that’s a law older than any of theirs.”

“Traitors,” Remus repeats. “And how exactly did the Potters betray you, Sirius?”

He drops the paper in his surprise. He does not drop Harry, who has started to shift unhappily. 

“The Potters?” Sirius repeats, and the fire is building again, but his hands are infinitely gently as he bounces Harry in his arms. “The Potters? I would _never_ \- Remus, you of all people should know better than that.” He almost seems amused now, his mood shifting like the most temperamental of seas. “You’ve a better idea of me than Dumbledore himself. Do you really think I’m capable of casting a Fidelius? Peter did that. And Peter betrayed them.”

Here is a thing that Remus knows that his wolf does not:

He has never heard Sirius lie.

He is not entirely certain he can.

“What are you?” he asks wearily, dropping back into his rickety chair. Grief has worn him too thin this past week for him to have enough energy to fight now. “What are you exactly?”

“I’m his godfather,” Sirius says, bouncing Harry up again, like that answers anything, like he hadn’t appeared out of the shadows ten minutes ago without a single tell-tale crack of apparition and hinted at everything Remus had guessed. “And I need your help.”

Like everything Sirius says, it’s the truth.

**Harry**

Harry grows up knowing the following things:

He is a wizard, like Remus is, like his father was, but not like Sirius is. Sirius is different, and unlike Remus, Harry doesn’t feel the particular need to find out why. Sirius is Sirius, and that’s all Harry needs to know.

He is loved. He is loved fiercely and totally and without reservation, and nothing he can do can ever possibly change this. Even if it is his mistake that almost gets them caught in France; even if he loses his temper and shouts in Germany; even if he is too reckless and almost dies in Belgium.

The last, he knows, is a particularly serious offense, and Sirius and Remus agree with this. They do not know that he knows part of why this is.

His blood is the last anchor Sirius has. When Harry goes, Sirius will go with him - unless Harry manages to have children first, he supposes, an uncomfortable thought that makes him eye girls warily for the next month.

Harry also grows up knowing he will go to Hogwarts despite Remus’s doubts.

He does not take the train. He doesn’t have to.

Sirius slips between the shadows and takes Harry with him. No one notices Harry as he jostles into line, not until he steps up and takes his place under the hat, his name shouted out for the whole school to hear. Then everyone goes dead silent.

No one else sees Sirius’s face lingering in the shadows while the hat calls out, “Gryffindor!”

Harry grins at him, and Sirius winks, and then Sirius is gone, and the whole Hall is silent, and for the first time in his life, Harry feels alone.

Then the Gryffindors break out into cheers, and Harry makes his way over to the first empty spot at the table he can find.

He is very relieved when a red-headed boy joins him a few minutes later.

He is much less relieved when Professor McGonagall won’t let him go to the dormitory after the feast and instead marches him up to the headmaster’s office.

They ask him questions for hours. He tells the truth and nothing but the truth, just as Sirius taught him.

They aren’t as good at listening as Sirius is.

He can’t see Remus much during the school year, but at really important events, like his Quidditch games, Sirius sneaks him in.

Nothing can keep Sirius out of Hogwarts, nor anyone he chooses to bring.

At one of those matches, Sirius scans the crowd, and his gaze rests on Draco, just for a moment.

“Watch that one,” he whispers to Harry as he releases him from a tight embrace. 

Draco is not like Sirius, Harry doesn’t think. Not quite. Which is a problem because if he was like Sirius, of course there would be nothing to worry about.

But the shadows cling to him a little too tightly, so Harry watches all the same.

He’s careful. He knows he has to be careful for Sirius’s sake.

But he also has to fight a troll, for Hermione’s sake, and Sirius laughs uproariously at that story, so it’s probably alright.

He does not laugh when he hears someone let it in on purpose.

“They used to walk these lands,” he says, eyes distant. “I forgot they didn’t anymore.” He frowns, and there is something in his eyes that suggests he and Remus are going to have the Murder Argument again. “I’ll look into it.”

(“The murder argument?” Hermione demands in a shrill voice later. She and Ron shoot each other very concerned looks.)

(Harry frowns. “The Murder Argument,” he agrees, wondering if Hermione hadn’t heard him. “It’s always a solution, but it’s not normally the best solution, only Sirius likes to bring it up anyway to see if maybe this time is the time Remus won’t say no. They argue about it a lot.”)

(Ron nods sagely. “It’s like the Car Argument,” he says, and Harry can hear the wealth of history behind those words, so he agrees even before Ron adds, “It’s one of those arguments adults have to keep on having even after they both know which one of them’s always going to win it.”)

(Hermione does not seem comforted.)

But he is careful, and he knows his limits.

When he knows the stone is at risk, he goes to the place Sirius told him to go, and he bleeds carefully onto a much more prosaic piece of stone.

But still a very powerful one.

Like McGonagall, Sirius listens carefully to what he has to say. Unlike McGonagall, Sirius doesn’t dismiss him. 

Instead, he nods and kisses Harry’s forehead before striding off to the third floor corridor.

When Harry hears word that Quirrell’s head was found on Dumbledore’s desk, the only part that surprises him is that the head isn’t Snape’s.

(“Yes,” Remus concedes, “fine, on very, very rare occasions, like Voldemort trying to return, murder is an acceptable solution to a problem. But _only then,_ Harry.”)

(Harry nods and keeps this in mind.)

Everyone acts very surprised to see him in his second year, and Harry isn’t sure why. Just because he vanished out of the hands of the Aurors who tried to grab him at the train station in June didn’t mean he wasn’t coming back.

Honestly.

He is very careful and very good, and he remembers that murder is only acceptable if Voldemort is coming back and not if, for example, Draco Malfoy is being infuriating, or Colin Creevey is sort of stalking him, or Professor Lockhart vanishes all the bones in his arm.

That’s what slug spewing spells, secret passages, and Skele-gro are for.

He is a little curious what that latter will do when a few drops are slipped into the professor’s drink since he technically already has all his bones.

The results are very interesting.

“That’s the basilisk,” Sirius says when Harry finally admits what’s been going on to him. “That’s definitely the basilisk.” He considers this for a few moments. “I might need to get some help for this one,” he admits.

(He gets Andromeda.)

Three hours later, there is a basilisk head sitting on Dumbledore’s desk with stabbed out eyes.

This does not, unfortunately, stop Ginny from being possessed, which Harry finds out eight hours later when he wakes up to her trying to stab him.

But he hits the diary with a spell Sirius taught him in all the confusion, so everything’s fine. It’s not nearly as traumatic as France, at least not for him, though he does understand that it’s different for Ginny.

He doesn’t know why McGonagall keeps staring at him like that.

In his third year, the Ministry announces that this is intolerable, and they simply must catch Sirius. They put dementors around the school in their efforts to catch him.

Sirius laughs at the idea of them catching him. He does not laugh at the idea of dementors.

Remus spends all that summer teaching Harry to cast a patronus.

Harry is very, very glad that it’s a stag.

(“Shouldn’t we try to clear Sirius’s name if he’s innocent?” Hermione asks. She is neck deep in trying to prove Buckbeak’s innocence, they all are, but they’re already past the appeal and down to hopes for a last second pardon.)

(Harry does not have much faith in the justice system.)

(“Besides,” Ron says philosophically, “what does it matter? He can already do whatever he wants anyway.”)

(“But what if he wants a - a job? Or a family? Or to settle somewhere?”)

(Harry tries to picture Sirius working at the Ministry or running a little shop in Diagon Alley. He fails miserably.)

(“I really don’t think he cares,” he says doubtfully.)

(“Well, what about Remus?” she says triumphantly. Remus, after all, is the Normal One.)

(“Well, he’s a werewolf, isn’t he?” Ron says in a reasonable voice. “So he can’t do any of those things anyway.”)

(Hermione glows with the fury of a new crusade. Harry is quite happy to join this one.)

In his fourth year, Harry is a little afraid that Sirius is going to cut off the heads of the Triwizard judges and leave them on Dumbledore’s desk. Or possibly McGonagall’s, since one of the judge’s _is_ Dumbledore.

He doesn’t, thanks to very frantic and heartfelt arguments on the part of both Harry and Remus, although Karkaroff’s case is a close one.

He does, however, watch from the stands, and he knows the very instant that Harry vanishes from the maze.

He gets both Harry and Cedric back, but Barty Crouch Jr. gets away.

Three days later, Mad-Eye Moody dies and Voldemort rises anyway.

(“So Black,” Cedric says hesitantly in the infirmary.)

(“He’s innocent,” Harry says firmly, though he has mostly given up on people believing him.)

(“Alright,” Cedric says, only a little doubtfully. “Is he human, though?”)

(“Not particularly,” Harry admits, but he adds defiantly, “but he is a person.”)

(“Of course he is,” Cedric says, a little startled, and Harry likes him better after that.)

Fifth year is a mess. The papers have never been quite sure what to make of Harry - if he’s victim or villain, brainwashed or bespelled or frightened into submission or heroically saving them all - but now they are unrelentingly hostile.

As is Umbridge.

Sirius smells the blood immediately, and Harry, of course, does not hesitate to tell him what’s occurred.

Umbridge’s head does not appear on Dumbledore’s desk.

No part of her does. Nor does she appear in her classroom. Or the Ministry. Or anywhere, no matter how many people Fudge sends looking for her.

A tough looking Auror takes her place. Remus, in response to Harry’s tentative letter, does not speak to Sirius for a month.

Sirius shows Harry the Room of Requirement and gives him a hopeful look, as though he thinks this treat is an acceptable offering in exchange for what they all know he has done.

Harry hugs Sirius.

But he is very careful not to complain in front of him after that.

**Regulus**

When Regulus is small, just a little wisp of shadow, barely woken, he follows in Sirius’s footsteps and grows strong in his light.

But Bellatrix’s hunts grow ever wilder and more gleeful, and Sirius’s hunts grow ever more constrained, and Regulus doesn’t understand why Sirius won’t follow him, just this once.

The older shadows - the ones that would need a full life spilled out to take form, or twenty lives, or a hundred - they whisper to him, and he listens.

These are their lands - theirs to hunt upon, theirs to rule, and they need more blood if they are ever to wake the old ones fully. Who has the right to restrain them?

Blood purity is nothing to him, not like it is for Bella - but then Bella is a special case, unwittingly given life by her precious Tom on one of his trips back to the school. Of course she agrees with him.

Regulus was the product of a three-House brawl. He feels tugged in a dozen directions at once, but there is only one direction he wants to go.

(Well. Two.)

(But he’s made his choice.)

The professors think the House Elves of Hogwarts follow their orders, and they do, of course they do.

But the House Elves also follow the orders of the students. The staff aren’t special in that regard.

The shadows, though.

The shadows are special, and the House Elves know it. They bleed on the stones so much oftener than anyone else even in these gentle days under Dumbledore.

House Elf blood will not wake them up, not fully, but it is why the old ones can still whisper, and it is why Regulus is so fond of them.

(He is fond of Kreacher in particular, and he thinks - Well, he wonders - )

(Kreacher had been the one to scrub the blood off the stones after that brawl. He had been the one who caught a bit of it and carried it to the proper place. And it had been then, only then, that Regulus had been strong enough to take form.)

(Regulus is very fond of Kreacher.)

That, it turns out, is his line in the sand: Kreacher is not for hunting.

He gets his revenge, of course. What else could he do?

When the Dark Lord’s potions inflame his mind and he dreams of Sirius turning his back, again and again and again, he does not cry out for water.

He cries out for blood.

And Kreacher offers it, of course he does, but it is still not quite enough.

He is half a dream already, and he does not know how to make his way back from this hunt.

He doesn’t, he can’t, no matter what Kreacher tries, but the years turn, and at last an old man and a young boy come and bleed on the stone.

And the boy - oh, he knows that boy’s blood.

So for Sirius’s sake, he steps from the shadows as the boy frantically tries to conjure water for the old man, and he says, “We’ll have better luck at the castle,” and takes them both there, never mind the Dark Lord’s ward.

(There’s not a ward yet in the world that can keep him from these lands.)

The conjuration works here, of course, and if it hadn’t Regulus could have summoned up some water himself.

“You’re like Sirius,” the boy says with sharp eyes as the old man recovers.

“Sometimes,” he says, though he knows it is not what the boy means. “I suppose now you’ll be wanting to know what Kreacher did with that locket.”

(Kreacher is very glad to see him awake. He warms to the boy immediately.)

(Sirius is . . . also glad. Surprisingly so.)

(Perhaps he can follow Sirius’s hunt just this once. For Kreacher’s sake.)

**Sirius**

He knows what he is. He doesn’t know how not to be what he is. 

But when he sees the way Harry looks at him sometimes, he almost wants to try because Harry doesn’t ask for help now, doesn’t tell him things, and he couldn’t bear to let Harry be carved up when he could prevent it, but he doesn’t want this, not at all.

When Regulus returns unlooked for, he brings a locket and a tale of horcruxes with him.

When Harry returns as expected at the end of term, he bears a new grief and an all too familiar tale.

“I need help,” he admits, and the words feel like absolution.

“And you’ll have it,” Sirius promises. “You’ll always have it, whatever I can give.”

It is worth this war to see Harry’s smile.  



End file.
